1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to an apparatus and method for creating and replaying media files, and more particularly, to an apparatus and method for creating and displaying stereoscopic media files in a media file playback apparatus.
2. Description of the Related Art
Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG), which is an international multimedia standards organization, has released MPEG-2, MPEG-4, MPEG-7 and MPEG-21 standards since its first standardization of MPEG-1 in 1988. Multimedia Application Format (MAF), which is under standardization, intends to increase values of known standards by combining existing MPEG standards with non-MPEG standards to meet the industrial needs. The main purpose of the MAF standardization is to provide a standardized file format for a specific application, thereby enabling a wide use of the application and a supply of MPEG standards.
Recently, extensive research on methods for implementing Three-Dimensional (3D) videos has been conducted to represent more realistic video information. One of the methods scans both left and right-view images on the existing display device at their associated locations to separately image the left view and the right view on the left eye and the right eye of the user, using visual characteristics of human beings, thereby allowing the user to experience 3D effects. For example, a portable terminal equipped with a barrier Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) may provide more lifelike videos to the user by replaying stereoscopic contents.
Stereoscopic contents composed of two or more tracks may include, for each track, the same stereoscopic video-related information about, for example, a frame structure of stereoscopic streams, which of the left view sequence and the right view sequence was encoded first, and whether each frame is a stereoscopic or monoscopic video frame. The duplicate stereoscopic video-related information may be stored in only one track. Conventionally, however, a syntax based on which it is possible to determine the duplication of the stereoscopic video-related information, is not defined in a file format. Therefore, there is a need for a method and apparatus capable of providing information based on which duplication of stereoscopic video-related information can be determined, when each track of stereoscopic contents consisting of two or more tracks has the same stereoscopic video-related information.